Re: DEP5: minor suggestions - FSF address etc.

[Jari Aalto <jari.aalto@cante.net>]

2012-02-11 20:44 Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>:
| Le Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 12:23:12PM +0200, Jari Aalto a écrit :
|> (2) No ending commas in years
|
| I would apply this change if it were supported by more people, but given
| that the object of DEP 5 is to record upstream license and copyright
| statements, and given that Upstreams write such statements using many
| different styles, I would prefer to not normalise the examples and give
| the impression that the copyright statements need to be normalised to be
| compliant with the machine-readable format.

I though that DEP5 was intended to use for Debian and not to record how
upstram chose to write their copyright statements.

I feel that Debian should focus on standards and therefore also present
those standards in DEP documents to the readers that follow the DEPs.

In this case, the FSF lawyers probably know how to write proper Copyright
statements, as they have instructed:

    <http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html>

    A copyright notice looks like this:
    Copyright (C) year1, year2, year3 copyright-holder

    The word ‘Copyright’ must always be in English, by international
    convention.

    ...

    You can use a range (‘2008-2010’) instead of listing individual years
    (‘2008, 2009, 2010’) if and only if: 1) every year in the range,
    inclusive, really is a “copyrightable” year that would be listed
    individually; and 2) you make an explicit statement in a ‘README’ file
    about this usage.

In addition, typographically, it's illogical to have ending-commas in
written text like that.

Jari